I'm trying to learn how to use arduino to communicate with software. I know some C and PHP. I would like to be able to build a email checker, that would, for example, use PHP to get the information from the EMAIL, and if there is a new email, get a program in C that would send some serial information to arduino to turn a led on. I found something like that on the web, but using python, and I couldn't get how it works. If anyone could give me some advices, it would be nice.

Another thing would be to send some information from arduino to a program in C, for example, the number of an variable of somethings.

Thanks

BigMike

The arduino communicate to the PC using the serial port. You need an application running on the PC which can read and write to the serial port. This app can be written in C, but maybe easier in Visual Basic, Delphi or Processing.

That application will be able to poll an email server directly or it can call a PHP script running on a server somewhere.

Yeah, I know C can be quite complicate to communicate with serial. Do you know where I can get some information on how to communicate arduino with VB or Delphi? Or maybe even with processing (can I build some executable program for example *.exe on windows, that would communicate with arduino)?